Finishing Pumping

Well, despite all of the guilt that I am feeling, I have decided to slowly stop pumping and move the babes onto all formula. For the first 2 and a half months they got all expressed breast milk. When they started drinking more I had to supplement with some formula. Things always changed depending on how many bottles they were getting at the time. Lately they were getting half to three quarters breast milk and the rest formula. Maggie came home from the hospital on Neosure, a high calorie formula twice a day. She will have to stay on it until she is above the 25th percentile for her actual age (she is around 20% now).

At their 5 month NICU follow-up appointment I asked the Dr. if there was a certain age that he recommended I continue pumping until. He said getting them through the early few weeks and months on breast milk was the important time. Now, they are all growing well and are healthy and have gotten the benefit of breast milk for half a year. He said at any point I decided to stop and move them to formula would be just fine. If he would have recommended that I continue until 9 months or a year I definately would have done it. But getting his approval to switch over was nice.

For the past month or so I have been really run down and tired. Some days more so than in the eary days when I was functioning on a lot less sleep. I used to get maybe one cold a year, if that, but in the past 5 months I have had 3 colds, a flu and 2 bouts of mastitis.
Also, I didn't like plumping them in the swings all of the time when I was pumping. I tried to do it earlier when they were napping which worked okay but there are many times that someone needed a soothie or something while I was pumping. That also left little time to do anything during their naps. If everyone was down by 10:00am, I would get cleaned up from the feeding, have about 45 minutes until I would pump, it would be 11:30 when I was done and everyone would be up again (if not sooner). That was on a good napping day.

I know that doing it this long has been great for them and big accomplishment, but there still is some guilt for quitting. I am sure that many moms struggle with knowing when the right time to stop is. But in my case, a better rested mommy might be better for the babes (and for Daniel!) in the long run.

So, I have been decreasing the number of sessions a day that I am pumping and should be done in the next week or two. I will pack up the pump, take it back to Shopper's and pay a large rental bill. Although it has saved us money that we would have otherwise spent on formula. We now have them on a store brand formula (except Maggie's high cal) which is about $10-$13 cheaper per tin than the Nestle formula we were using for a few months. So now that we are using the cheaper stuff, it won't end up being all that much more money per month to use formula compared to paying to rent the pump.